A scene from the last episode in the first season of "The Mandalorian." The show returned for its second season on Disney+ Oct. 30.
DisneyAt first, Grant Homan mostly shared his work among his friends, but eventually, they grew a little weary of his memes—all of them starring Baby Yoda, the surprise mega-hit character from The Mandalorian, the Star Wars TV series returning on Friday to Disney+ for a second season. Homan came to his avocation naturally: He was reared on the six George Lucas-helmed Star Wars movies, watched the spinoff cartoons, attended several conventions and committed hundreds of hours to the obscure lore discussed in the Rebel Force Radio podcast. But when “my friends got tired of me posting the memes in the group chat, I decided to put them on Instagram,” says Homan, a 24-year-old accountant in La Plata, Maryland.
On there, he found a considerably more eager audience, and his @baby.yoda.memes_ has become one of the more widely followed accounts devoted to the extraterrestrial tyke. (It has 39, 700 followers and a less-than-subtle tagline: “All Baby Yoda, All the Time.”) Homan has even been able to monetize his social media presence, posting sponsored content for brands like PopSockets, which sells little widgets to better grip a smartphone, and Fathead, a maker of wall decals. He’s probably taken in about $2,000, charging the companies between $50 to a few hundred dollars for a post. “More than I ever expected,” he says.
In The Mandalorian, Baby Yoda is a refugee, the titular Mandalorian his armored guardian and surrogate father. In our world, he has found a home on the internet—particularly Instagram, where the character has become the app’s biggest pop culture sensation of the past year.
Baba Yoda had been kept a total secret when The Mandalorian debuted in November 2019. And in some ways, his popularity seemingly took even Disney’s master marketers by surprise. Months went by before Baby Yoda merchandise appeared in stores, and Disney even lost control of the character’s identity to mob rule. It originally christened him—simply—as The Child. But when the creature’s rabid online fanbase formed, it quickly rechristened him as Baby Yoda, and the epithet stuck to him like a tractor beam.
(Disney has continued to keep Baby Yoda’s backstory a mystery. But it probably rankles the corporate brandmasters in Burbank that fans conflated the new character with an old one: While Baby Yoda does seem to be the same species as wise Master Yoda from the Star Wars movies, he doesn’t appear to be an infant version of the same character.)
Actor Pedro Pascal plays the helmeted warrior known as The Mandalorian, who has become responsible for Baby Yoda.
DisneyPartly fueling the enthusiasm for Baby Yoda are the Instagram memes. Likely no TV show or movie has spawned more memes in the last 12 months than Baby Yoda, and over four dozen accounts have sprung up devoted to nothing but Baby Yoda memes. #BabyYoda has been used 1.4 million times, handily beating out titles like Tiger King (509,000), Love is Blind (267,000) and 90 Day Fiancé (263,000), three of the other most talked-about entertainment properties on Instagram in the last year.
Memes, which are a humorous mashup of images and text, have become an Instagram staple in the past several years—leading to million-dollar valuations for companies controlling portfolios of meme accounts and millions of followers, as well as thousands of smaller meme outlets, such as the ones publishing the Baby Yoda memes. Pop culture-based memes are especially popular, largely because they allow fans to interact with the characters more directly, says Instagram’s Ricky Sans, a strategic partnership manager overseeing the company’s relationship with its community of memers. In effect, these memes are sort of the grown-up version of playing with action figures—or, put differently, the social media form of fan fiction. But why has Baby Yoda specifically been so lovingly embraced? Sans has a straightforward answer. “He’s the most adorable creature on the planet,” he says. “You see Baby Yoda, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”
Homan, the guy behind @baby.yoda.memes_, has given the question considerable thought, too. The fact Disney didn’t heavily market the character at the start probably helped, he says, allowing Baby Yoda to escape the same fate as the Ewoks; the teddy bear-esque creatures from 1983’s Return of the Jedi were largely dismissed as a nakedly commercialistic bid to sell even more Star Wars toys. Since Disney wasn’t pushing Baby Yoda at people, Homan reasons, the internet felt comfortable embracing him as its own.
Homan has spent the past two weeks reposting his most popular memes, counting down to The Mandalorian’s Season 2 premiere. These top hits include an image of a surprised Baby Yoda (caption: “How I look when grandma gives me cookies after mom said no”) and another likening his shocked expression in a different scene to an old person first discovering the ease of online ordering. To create these memes, he has roughly 30 screenshots from the show saved to his phone, and he doesn’t typically use anything other than the device’s basic photo-editing software and Instagram to assemble everything.
The makeup of his audience has surprised him, and he says 65% to 70% of his account’s followers are women ages 18 to 35, a contrast to the stereotypical idea of a Star Wars devotee—a little boy or a man who can’t escape being a little boy. And through polls on Instagram, Homan has discovered half his audience say they’re not Star Wars fans. They’re there first and foremost for Baby Yoda and the memes, not out of some longstanding loyalty to the franchise. “They’re so into the character. It’s a gateway to Star Wars,” Homan says.
Baby Yoda's relationship with The Mandalorian, his surrogate parent, has inspired many father-son memes.
DisneyAnother popular account, @Baby_yoda_ig, which has 41,800 followers, is run by a cybersecurity analyst in Bucharest, Romania named Leo Vlad. Vlad had first tried to popularize an Instagram account based around Game of Thrones memes. But he started it too close to Thrones’ final eighth season, drawing in no more than a few hundred followers. The number exploded once he switched to Baby Yoda memes, and he partly attributes the memes’ success to the character’s silence: In The Mandalorian, Baby Yoda doesn’t talk, so to convey thoughts and feelings, the puppeteers controlling him give him dramatic facial expressions. And those wild faces lend themselves well to meme making. “He makes so many different reactions, and people can caption them,” says Vlad.
Ray Calubayan, a Rowan University finance major, runs @babyyoda_og. (The final two letters in the Instagram handle reference the slang term “OG” or “original gangster,” a marker Calubayan chose to emphasize he was one of the first to found a Baby Yoda account.) His 62,700 followers particularly liked his memes from last Christmas where he draped a Santa Claus outfit over the creature’s customary brown tunic. Since memes can be shared and are often reposted by other meme accounts, his biggest success was a Santa-Yoda combo that attracted 85,000 likes, more than double what he normally saw.
Unfortunately, Calubayan says, he’s lately faced a Tatooine-like drought. There’ve been no new episodes for almost a year—so no new Baby Yoda images to make into fresh memes—and engagement is down on his posts. He has eagerly awaited the arrival of the next season. “All Baby Yoda pages should get an increase in followers,” he says. What about predictions for what’ll happen with the character? “I’m not sure. Hopefully Baby Yoda doesn’t die. I don’t think he can die—he can’t die, right?” Calubayan says, working through his train of thought.
“Yeah, he can’t die. He’s too valuable to Disney,” he concludes. “And to me, too.”
The Link LonkOctober 30, 2020 at 05:00PM
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How Baby Yoda From 'The Mandalorian' Became The Biggest Meme Star In The Galaxy - Forbes
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